MCL.L Regulatory News (MCL)

11 January 2017

Morses Club PLC

Acquisition of Shelby Finance Ltd.

Morses Club PLC ("Morses Club" or "the Company"), the UK's second largest home collected credit ("HCC") lender, is pleased to announce the acquisition of Shelby Finance Ltd. ("Shelby Finance"), a provider of online instalment loans.

Shelby Finance is fully authorised by the FCA to provide online instalment loans and will operate as a subsidiary of Morses Club PLC.

This acquisition is an important strategic development for Morses Club as it will accelerate the launch of a new, branded online instalment loan product. The Company has seen an increasing number of visitors to its website who are looking for alternatives to its core HCC offering. The introduction of an online instalment loan product is the next step in the Company's strategy of developing digital products to complement its HCC offering and target a wider range of customers across the UK non-standard credit market.

Paul Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Morses Club, commented:

"The acquisition of Shelby Finance is another example of the progress we continue to make with our strategic plan of using technology to offer customers a broader range of products, supplementing our core home collected credit offering and ensuring customers can access credit with the flexibility they require.

"Outside the HCC sector, there are c. 9 million additional customers who access the wider non-standard credit market. The introduction of our new branded online instalment loan product will enable us to offer these customers access to credit in increasingly flexible ways with all the benefits of Morses Club's customer service ethos.

"We anticipate that the new online instalment loan product will be launched in the first half of our trading year and look forward to updating the market once the full launch plan has been finalised."

For further information

Notes to Editors

Morses Club is the second largest UK Home Collected Credit lender with over 207,000 customers and approximately 1,840 agents across 100 locations throughout the UK.

The Company offers a range of loan products to its customers through its extensive agent network. A significant majority of the Company's borrowers are repeat customers and the Company enjoys consistently high customer satisfaction scores of at least 95 per cent.

The Company is using technology to broaden its offering and provide new products to ensure customers can access credit with the flexibility they require. In April 2016 its cashless lending product, the Morses Club Card, was introduced, enabling its customers to buy online as well as on the high street.

Morses Club successfully listed on AIM in May 2016.

About the UK non-standard credit market

The UK non-standard credit market, of which UK HCC is a subset, consists of both secured and unsecured lending and is estimated to comprise around 12 million consumers.

Non-standard credit is the provision of secured and unsecured credit to consumers other than through mainstream lenders. Lenders providing non-standard credit principally lend on an unsecured basis.

Since 2009, unsecured personal lending has grown from £161 billion to £244 billion in 2015.

UK Home Collected Credit

UK HCC is considered to be a specialised segment of the broader UK non-standard credit market. UK HCC loans are typically small, unsecured cash loans delivered via self-employed agents directly to customers' homes. Repayments are collected in person during weekly follow-up visits to customers' homes.

UK HCC is considered to be stable and well-established, with approximately 3 million people using the services of UK HCC lenders, of which between 1.5 million and 2 million people borrow regularly.